Michigan House Oversight Hearing Sets Stage For Bills Targeting Adolescent Gender-Affirming Care

Equality Michigan says gender-affirming care remains legal and safe despite legislative efforts to restrict access

Ben Solis

Published: November 5, 2025 | Last Updated: November 5, 2025

Three individuals who have gone through the process of “detransitioning,” or seeking to reverse the effects of gender-affirming care, testified before a House subcommittee on Tuesday, setting up a series of bills introduced by Republican lawmakers to prohibit treatment for Michigan youth struggling with their gender identities.

The hearing before the House Oversight Child Welfare System Subcommittee also included testimony from a woman hailed by conservative activists as a whistleblower against a healthcare system that engaged in gender-affirming care, who claimed that children and teenagers facing uncertainty over their sexual orientation should ride out their adolescence into adulthood before making a decision to transition to another gender that more closely matches how they feel.

Chaired by Republican state Rep. Luke Meerman of Coopersville, the subcommittee hearing offered no counterbalance to the claims of supposed harm that affected the lives of those testifying. No advocates for, or members of, the transgender community, their families nor gender-affirming care providers attended the hearing.

House communications staff said that state Rep. Sharon MacDonnell (D-Troy) invited Equality Michigan to speak during the hearing, but the organization backed out at the last minute. In future hearings, the Republican-controlled committee is planning to invite transgender community activists, hospital representatives and the American Medical Association to give testimony.

Emme Zanotti, senior director of Movement Building and Political Affairs with Equality Michigan, said the opposite was true, and that the organization reached out and inquired about testifying, not the other way around.

Those who testified warned of what they described as lasting harm from making the decision to transition too early, and of a medical system that they felt pushed them into beginning gender-affirming treatments without care for their mental health and well-being.

MacDonnell was the sole voice in defense of the transgender community among the five-person subcommittee to say that many people who undergo surgeries or therapies in gender-affirming medical care have positive experiences and go on to live happy lives, and that the population that regrets those decision years later or have complications is 1% to 2%.

Still, MacDonnell acknowledged the experiences shared during the hearing as legitimately painful even if they did not represent the sum total experience of transgender people.

All of this occurred against the backdrop of bills introduced in May by state Rep. Brad Paquette (R-Niles), Rep. Tom Kunse (R-Clare) and Rep. Jaime Greene (R-Richmond), which seek to prohibit gender-affirming medical care for Michigan youth and teenagers. The legislative package includes House Bill 4466, House Bill 4467 and House Bill 4468.

The lead bill, HB 4467, creates statutory definitions of what it means to be a man or a woman and offers no legal definitions nor acknowledgements of other identities on the gender spectrum, a position at odds with scientific consensus.

The bill does not define gender, either, defaulting only to a classification of biological sex, which Paquette describes as “an individual’s immutable biological classification as male and female.”

The meat of the policy states that, as otherwise provided in law, a healthcare professional shall not knowingly engage in or cause any gender-affirming care practices to be administered on a minor child or teenager. That includes hormone therapies to increase or block androgen, testosterone, estrogen or progesterone, or surgeries to alter a person’s genitalia.

Paquette’s legislation would create a legal cause of action that a person could file against a healthcare provider or health system. It would also give the attorney general’s office the ability to pursue legal remedies.

The other two bills, sponsored by Greene and Kunse, respectively, would allow insurance companies to cover procedures or medications to undo gender-affirming care, and create licensure sanctions for medical providers.

Each of the bills were referred to the House Health Policy Committee. They have not yet received a hearing, but the testimony taken Tuesday before the House Oversight subcommittee will undoubtedly play a role in future discussions on the bills, and could recycle some of the same testimony in the larger committee.

None of the legislation has any chance of actually becoming law while Democrats control the state Senate, and Gretchen Whitmer, a staunch LGBTQ+ advocate, remains as Michigan’s governor.

Following the hearing, Zanotti said Equality Michigan’s Action Network welcomes constructive, substantive and educational dialog with all Michiganders, whether that be legislators or otherwise, on the role and nature of gender-affirming care.

Zanotti, however, said that conversation needs to take place in “an arena where transparency and the truth are promoted, and that’s not what happened today.”

“The House Oversight Committee, and now one of its subcommittees, under Republican leadership have spent four-and-a-half hours in eight days trying to delegitimize trans people’s existence and erase them from the state of Michigan,” Zanotti said.

As to whether the bills also served as a way to erase or delegitimize the transgender experience in Michigan, Zanotti said the response was the same.

“What was all of this for today?” Zanotti said. “If we’re concerned about the well-being of gay kids or trans kids, and one of the speakers seemed very concerned about the well being of gay kids — we have that in common at Equality Michigan Action Network — why wasn’t today’s conversation about food assistance for people who are being impacted by Trump’s government shutdown? Where was that conversation? That’s what’s hurting kids in Michigan, LGBTQ or otherwise.”

Zanotti went on to say that gender-affirming care remains legal in Michigan, as well as safe, despite the current presidential administration’s attempts to actively make the practice less safe for young people and their families.

“Providers are following the law. They’re following evidence-based standards when they provide this care, and most importantly, young people and their families need to continue to be able to be the ones who are making this decision about their futures,” Zanotti said. “That shouldn’t be up to elected officials in Lansing or Washington, D.C.; it shouldn’t be up to people who have made false whistleblowing claims that have not borne true in investigations. It should be up to parents and their kids, full stop.”

This article has been republished courtesy of Michigan Advance under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.